Microsoft
As Sony’s success proved to the world, innovation and hard work could pay off and the big boys, meaning Nintendo and Sega could be taken down. Sony had free reign for the next few years and even though Sega tried one last time to overtake them by releasing their awesome Dreamcast system in 1999, it wasn’t a lasting victory. Sony had a new console in the works and would soon release the PS2 and pretty much seal the Dreamcasts fate. Although the DC did have a couple of good years and there are some memorable games to come from the cursed system like Shenmue and Grandia 2 and the NFL2K series. It was also the first home console that allowed online gaming. Nintendo even tried releasing a disc based system, Gamecube, but with its tiny discs and no online support, they fell back even further.
The only company that made a run at Sony in terms of sales and a real
competition was Microsoft. They figured out that there was some real
money to make in the video game market and released the Xbox. It was
more powerful than the PS2 and had online capability. It was an instant
hit with fans of first person shooters with hits like Halo. It was the
first real competition for the PS2 when it launched. Over the next
couple of years, as it gained more of a share of the market and the
popularity of some of its exclusive games grew, especially its online
community which thrived and grew faster than any of the others,
Microsoft began working on its next generation system. This time they
would be the first console to market and beat the next generation of
Nintendo’s and Sony’s machines onto retail shelves. They released the
Xbox360 in 2005 and it was a precursor of what was possible in terms of
game play and graphics, but also what an online gaming community could
be. Xbox Live, the online gaming community of Xbox was an instant hit.
It was never so easy to meet up with players from around the world and
to play games with them. You could even use a headset and talk live to
the other players if you wished. Xbox had over a year before Sony and
Nintendo launched their new systems and had a year to get entrenched
into people’s homes and become the game console of choice for the next
generation.